


A Stranger With Your Hair

by pineapplesquid



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 20:52:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplesquid/pseuds/pineapplesquid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's hard enough for Steve to leave his ghosts behind, without seeing them in the people around him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Stranger With Your Hair

            Steve’s barely been awake a few hours the first time it happens. He’s sitting in a conference room, staring blankly out the open door, hardly noticing the cluster of agents walking by until he catches a flash of chestnut hair. He’s halfway out of his seat before his sense catches up with him. The woman out there isn’t Peggy. He could catch her by the arm, turn her around to see him, but he wouldn’t know her face. She’s not Peggy, she couldn’t help explain it to him, tell him what’s happened in all those frozen years. Peggy (the Peggy he knew, anyway) is gone. It’s that thought that finally breaks him, sends him staggering back to his chair, head in his hands.

 

            Of course, it keeps happening. A few days later he’s out on his own, trusted enough to go get lunch alone. As he’s sitting at the counter eating his sandwich and trying not to brood, a woman on his right laughs. He turns with a smile, to hear the joke that Bucky had just told her. The sinking feeling, when he sees her sitting alone talking on her phone, turns his sandwich so dry in his mouth that he can hardly swallow. It’s days before he leaves headquarters again.

 

            He trys to be rational about it. Everyone does it, in a new place. When he’d first started touring he kept thinking he saw old neighbors or friends in the audience, even hundreds of miles from home. But that had never hurt as much as the gut punch, every time, as he remembers that they’re all gone, that he left them and can never go back. So he reminds himself that it will pass, that it will happen less (and he silences the voice that says it might never stop all together). It’s unpredictable, but inevitable. A man with a bushy moustache; a laugh; someone with a coat the exact color of their old uniform; a pair of protective dark eyes looking over his shoulder; a man standing with the bearing of a soldier; a woman in dark red lipstick. Sometimes, even after he realizes, he thinks that he can almost see them, standing or walking between the people around him, still part of his life, his world. And every time he stops breathing, feeling like he’d just hit frozen water again.

 

            It does taper off, slowly. And then there’s the day, a few months after they save the world (some things don’t seem to change). He’s on the subway home after a day at the museum when a flicker of blond hair in the corner of his eye pulls his head around. He blinks at the tall blond woman in the red dress who definitely isn’t Thor. This time, though, instead of the shocking pain, he finds himself smiling. Thor may be gone, for now, but Tony and Jane swear that will change soon, and Steve’s looking forward to the day when he returns.

 

            And _then_ there’s the day when something in a crowd catches his eye (just the set of the shoulders, and the movement of an arm) and he manages to glimpse enough of a reflexion to realize that this time it actually _is_ Hawkeye. He doesn’t know why he’s being stalked by an archer, but he’s not as concerned as he probably should be. Instead, he finds himself plotting a trap, feigning obliviousness as he checks his phone for somewhere nearby that they could get lunch after he manages to catch his shadow. Finally, it’s not just a ghost in the corner of his eye.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from John Gorka's song of the same name.


End file.
